When the novel coronavirus swallowed the world’s consciousness, most people started wearing masks that covered up their mouths and noses. This put far too much pressure on the eyes to speak for the entire face. Eyebrow movements became shorthand for any emotion other than simmering anxiety. The range of human response shrank just as so many unraveled futures demanded nuanced explanation.
In the early days of wearing my mask, I felt freshly exposed. My large brown eyes had always revealed far too much of my fear and loneliness. That naked longing, which suddenly felt synonymous with my very being, made trips to the grocery store feel like putting my insecurities in a display window.
On the news, on our phones, on our minds was a daily death counter. It soared to hundreds of thousands of human lives while the projections only worsened. I lived alone and I couldn’t give the virus to my dog (as far as I knew), so my main exposure to the unrelenting devastation was through podcasts, talk shows, news broadcasts, and passing conversations.
The privilege to look away from mass suffering felt like its own insidious societal illness. My attempts to resume some semblance of a familiar routine revealed the vapid things that kept me feeling satisfied. I continued to post on my dog’s Instagram, impulsively shop online, and tweet up to 280 characters whenever I felt important and/or terrified.
While finding out exactly how many books, movies, meals, and pieces of furniture I could have brought to my door, it became clear that global resource allocation was tipped in favor of my convenience. The rate at which packages materialized blurred the reality that people were risking their lives to deliver instant gratification.
I heard on a podcast that a pizza delivery service was offering compliments to customers for $1 extra. I imagined people saying things like “It’s either one extra topping or emotionally fulfilling human contact.” I thought about delivery drivers summoning performative gestures for others instead of sustainable goodness for themselves. I never paid for a compliment or a pandemic pizza, but I came close.
I grew to realize that I wasn’t even awaiting the “end” in any positive or negative sense. It seemed like reality would simply continue to fracture while people chose teams based on ideas about masks, science, and mortality itself. Without a baseline of scientific fact, what could we truly know about what was happening within our own bodies? What was a “viral” think piece if thinking itself was an act that could become politicized? For some people, it may have just been easier to subconsciously shift expectations about what a full life entails. The psychic pangs of existential dread could be weathered by ignorance, distance, and a learned culture of individualistic cruelty.
It was tempting to hand off the burden of my misery to the universe and its eagerness to close in on the entire human population. It was easier to have one big thing to blame for all of my regretful thoughts and actions. Living on the outskirts of surrender was both numbing and addictive.
Personally, it was somewhat comforting to adjust to the reality that, just outside of our doors, there was something new that could kill us if we didn’t follow a list of ever-changing rules. The setup was familiar because I had already been living with anxiety for over three decades. It felt, on some level, like everyone was finally coming inside to be scared with me. Virtual masses tweeting from sterile apartments. A flimsy community of people primed to catastrophize.
The collective drive across all social media feeds was to curate a neat, removed brand of suffering: the kind someone could hashtag, optimize, or blog about. The relentless noise was a cacophony of questions like “When can I hug someone again?” and “Who else is getting really into baking?” Cries for validation were distilled into a standardized stream of recognizable behavioral patterns. This included displays of exactly how comfortable some felt disregarding precautions meant for the greater good. Travel photos, videos of crowded parties, and images of packed restaurants continued to construct marketable personalities for some people’s online facades. As toxic as social media had become, it still felt safer to keep push notifications on. It was the only way to avoid compulsively opening apps to check for faint signs of life or fresh death. If I had to go to my phone for it to tell me things in those early days of adapting, I would have done little else.
Superficial motives notwithstanding, it no longer felt as frivolous or indulgent to document fleeting moments. For most people on the planet, such momentary blips had proven to be tectonic. For example, it only took a few podcasts, tweets, and texts for me to open a Google tab and search for “best face masks.”
In addition to the sights and sounds of people trying to seize their final days, online spaces were filled with pleas by medical professionals for patience, compassion, federal assistance, ICU beds, and ventilators to heal the sick. Even though the real war was against an illness, online engagement had been optimized in the direction of forgetting that bodies existed, persisted, and deteriorated.
For the first month of the pandemic’s documented reign in the United States, people rushed to intellectualize it. The world just wanted it to be done, for the chaos to be something behind glass in a museum. Calls were put out in major publications to write everything down, take pictures, save documents, freeze time. Great writers published gorgeous musings that felt both profound and laced with a heightened fear of the unknown. In a political and social climate where facts could be negated or manipulated, human beings couldn’t help but anticipate the failings of their own short memories for tragedy.
Scientific evidence faced off against willful ignorance and actively corrupt systems. Powerful people dangled hope in the form of stimulus checks, election results, and imaginary vaccines (?). People continued to bend on command because their true desires were no longer known to them. While humanity fractured, reality was being repackaged and sold on a minute-by-minute basis.
Free time and screen time had become the same concept. I had started measuring my existence in units of meals, conclusions, revisions, small heartbreaks, vet visits, Zoom calls, work emails, social emails, marketing emails, campaign emails, spam calls, lifesaving calls, grocery lists, checking account statements, company announcements, news headlines, tweets about news headlines, online dating matches, LinkedIn requests, dog walks, laundry loads, refrigerator trips, glasses of water, daily steps, deleted calendar invites, panic attacks, familiar disappointments, irrational health scares, rational health scares, and days spent staring at walls.
Romantic love and self-love felt like competitors in a zero-sum quest for happiness. Despite the implicit urgency in pursuing companionship, intimacy felt like too much to safely explore with someone new. Dates were no longer easily available distractions. Instant gratification that involved the tangible presence of others had become too much work. Swiping, messaging, and learning how to both cry and flirt on Zoom had to pass for what had already felt rare in the “normal” world.
I could no longer just go to the movies and cry into a giant bucket of buttery popcorn while cradling an obscenely large beverage. I used to embed myself among silent bodies in a giant room with the lights off several times a week because it helped me cross the anxiety barrier between my stressful work life and my stressful “everything else” life. Writing and art and music and holding hands in the dark while seeing the world expand before your eyes were all things I needed to mourn because I tolerated most of life just to get to them.
After I had been alone for months, a giant cockroach fell into my bed. It was so large that the sound of it balancing on my blinds sounded like a small rodent burrowing through my ceiling. Through bloodshot eyes, I made eye contact with the silhouette of the roach tumbling downward into my sheets. As I ran from my bedroom “area” to my living “area” in the single room I’d tricked myself into calling a home, I saw my intruder take flight in my periphery. It scurried up walls and through cabinets as I frantically tried to end the nightmare.
After grabbing a broom, I widened my defensive perimeter by opening my front door. I stood in my hallway until after the sun came up and eventually watched the cockroach casually take its leave. I followed it for a while down a very long hallway, tracing its trial and error as it examined door after door. I felt sorry for it in a way I didn’t expect to because it seemed lost. It had been several months since I had seen most of my neighbors or any signs of life beyond grocery bags being hauled in and mail being picked up. The roach had been my most lively visitor in a while.
Just before the pandemic prompted widespread lockdowns, I had developed a crush that felt like hope. This spark of organic attraction was the first one I had felt in quite some time. It was based on two warm, flirty couch conversations at social gatherings, shared stories of immigrant childhoods, and a fondness for the early works of problematic hip hop artists. Our eyes met, our laughs harmonized, and a mutual intrigue seemed to linger as we riffed on each other’s work stories and pop culture references.
I sent an invite for a coffee date late at night after her birthday party and she said her calendar looked full. Whatever this meant was irrelevant because I was told to cut off all contact with human beings three days later. I found myself scrolling back to our brief message chain during those first few tumultuous weeks of pandemic life. I wondered if this was the last time I would ever flirt in a way that felt more affirming than destructive. My crush was intentionally downgraded to a sustainable simmer to salvage emotional resources. Its muted resting state was a reminder that I had always needed to suppress my impulses to survive. This knowledge was its own kind of loneliness.
I moved back to suburbs walled off by heightened surveillance, high property taxes, and delusional political signage because I wanted to hide from the world. I also found myself wanting a house of my own because I had fallen for the familiar trick that it was innately a home. I briefly shopped for a “3 bed, 2 bath with optional study” kind of safety even though it was overwhelming to even desire such a thing. Seeing the plot of land on which my hypothetical custom house would be built solidified that it was merely an expensive straw to grasp. It held little more than the promise of more walls to close around myself.
At some point, the dust began to settle. I found myself both amazed and terrified by how human beings could absorb tragedy and forge ahead. The pandemic was the backdrop to a historic election, but not merely because of its existence. People had already voted through the Civil War and an entirely different pandemic in the early 20th century. The election was pivotal because it felt like a referendum on our capacity for kindness in the face of many systemic ills. It was surreal to imagine that we would simply continue, but that’s exactly what happened. Votes were counted, then denied, then wrapped up in troubling narratives and imagined grievances meant to distract from American inventions that continued to plague entire populations. Enough of us believed things could get better, which felt like progress.
As I moved forward, my needs became simpler. I learned how to locate immense joy in a cool day, a long walk, and a restful nap. I also started telling my friends I loved them on a regular basis and held them close in new ways. I started to let myself be fully, unapologetically human for the very first time while embracing a new season of familiar longing.